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Aliens: What If... is a five-issue limited comic book series that was first published by Marvel Comics from March-July 2024. It was written by Paul Reiser, Leon Reiser, Adam F. Goldberg, Brian Volk-Weiss, and Hans Rodionoff, illustrated by Guiu Vilanova, colored by Yen Nitro, lettered by VC's Clayton Cowles, and edited by Sarah Brunstad. Cover art was provided by Phil Noto while variant cover art was provided by various artists.
In Marvel's Alien comics line, Aliens: What If... was preceded by Alien: Descendant, published concurrently with Alien: Black, White & Blood, and followed by Alien: Romulus.
Publisher's summary[]
#1: WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? For years, fans of James Cameron’s legendary Aliens questioned whether Carter Burke, a company man more hateable than the Xenos themselves, had actually survived the traumatic events on the terraforming colony Hadley’s Hope. Now the actor behind the beloved villain, Paul Reiser, joins his son Leon and the star-studded team of writers and producers Adam F. Goldberg, Brian Volk-Weiss and Hans Rodionoff for a journey back to Hadley’s Hope and the twisted escape of a man who should have died.
#2: WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? Thirty-five years after the disaster on Hadleys Hope, company man Carter Burke is eeking out a cursed existence on a backwater asteroid. With his once-promising career in the toilet, Burke’s only remaining purpose in life is to care for his daughter, Brie. She hates him, probably for being a horrible person. And when she finds out what he’s up to now? It’s not going to be a friendly reunion. Has Burke learned his lesson, or is he about to get all of his companions killed again?
#3: WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? The facehuggers hit the fan as Burke's plan goes horribly awry! Desperate to capture the life-saving adaptative qualities of Xenomorph DNA – without Weyland-Yutani's knowledge – Burke and his only friend, a damaged combat synth named Cygnus, have brought Burke's own worst nightmare right into his living room. The trap is set – now they need a victim to snap it. What the hell is Burke doing, and how does his daughter, Brie, fit into all this?
#4: WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? Or more importantly, what if Carter Burke was about to die a different, even more horrible death?! Xenomorphs are loose on the mining asteroid where Burke’s made his small sad life and even-more-insignificant career. Panic is about to break out, slaughter to follow – and once again, it’s all Burke’s fault. Is this justice at last for the consummate company man? Or is there more to Burke’s character hidden beneath the mountain of mistakes?
#5: WHAT IF…CARTER BURKE HAD LIVED? As if Burke wasn’t already the worst boss in this galaxy, he just kicked off the office party from hell. Xenomorphs are loose in the mines, in the vents…hell, someone better check under the copier. It’s all to save his beloved wife and redeem himself in the eyes of his estranged daughter, but Burke’s in WAY over his head. Did he escape Hadley’s Hope all those years ago just to meet the same fate now? We make no promises, True Believer – except the promise of entertainment!
Plot[]
In the late 2150's, a terraforming colony known as Hadley's Hope was established on moon LV-426, funded in part by the multinational corporation Weyland-Yutani. Unbeknownst to the colonists, the moon was also the crash-site of an ancient extraterrestrial spacecraft that carried a dangerous alien species as its cargo. Weyland-Yutani, however, had known of the creatures' existence for decades and secretly sought specimens for study and profit.
In 2179, contact with the colony was suddenly lost. A junior Weyland-Yutani executive, Carter Burke, enlisted a team of "grunts" to join his investigation into the matter. Upon arrival, they found the colony overrun with Xenomorphs and nearly all the colonists dead. It was soon revealed that Burke's only purpose was to obtain a Xenomorph sample, which he was willing to sacrifice human lives to get. In the end Burke's greed cost him his life and the lives of others on Hadley's Hope.
But what if... Carter Burke survived?
Right when the squadron elected to execute Burke for his deceitfulness, the electricity went out. Gorman was ordered to guard Burke to prevent him from escaping while the others investigated the blackout. When the survivors subsequently found themselves set upon by a horde of Xenomorphs, Burke implored Gorman to do something, and as soon as the Lieutenant released him to engage the Xenomorphs, Burke slipped away amidst the chaos, locking the survivors in the operations center with the Xenomorphs. Upon fleeing through the med lab, Burke found himself face-to-face with an alien before being cocooned within its hive.
Back in the operations center, Lt. William Gorman and PFC Jenette Vasquez had been trapped by the creatures. Not wanting to be taken back to the Hive and impregnated, Gorman and Vasquez killed themselves and the several Xenomorphs that surrounded them by detonating a grenade with an explosion strong enough to also knock Burke free from the hive, allowing him to escape. Unbeknownst to the remaining survivors, Burke snuck aboard the dropship and made it back on board the USS Sulaco undetected. From a distance, Burke watched Ripley fight off a Queen Xenomorph with a power loader before stowing himself away in the ship's cargo hold until everyone was asleep in their hypersleep chambers.
Burke immediately made contact with Weyland-Yutani CEO Shin Yutani and appraised him of the loss of Hadley's Hope. Shin, outraged at the loss of both the colony and the Xenomorphs, berated him for his "gross mishandling" of the situation, and considered leaving him to die in space, unmoved by Burke's protestations that he has a family to care for. However, Burke points out that leaving Ellen Ripley to drift let her escape once. Shin considered this and agreed to send a rescue mission to retrieve Burke - as soon as Burke dealt with Ripley and the other survivors himself. Burke protested, but Shin forced his hand. Reluctantly, Burke took the option that would give them the best chance of survival, figuring Ripley would be strong enough to survive - he set off the fire alarms and had the hypersleep capsules automatically loaded into the escape pod and jettisoned into the atmosphere of a nearby planet with a breathable atmosphere. Fiorina "Fury" 161.
Thirty-five years later, Carter Burke is the Operations and Assets Manager of D350-L8, a backwater mining colony on an asteroid rich in Trimonite, an ultra-dense material that seldom naturally occurs in large quantities, making it highly sought-after. Despite ensuring permanent employment for himself and financial security for his family, Burke is effectively an exile, his reputation destroyed after the company made him the scapegoat for the loss of Hadley's Hope and used non-disclosure agreements to effectively gag him from giving his own side of the story. So well-known is the company's spin of him as an unscrupulous executive who sacrificed a colony to try and capture a live Xenomorph specimen that his name has become synonymous with that of Judas. His wife Zoe, afflicted with an incurable illness, remains in suspended animation at his behest in an effort to prolong her life while he searches for treatments. His daughter, Brie, works as a miner and refuses to speak to him despite his continual attempts at reconnecting with her.
Trapped in an unfulfilling job full of subordinates he largely tolerates, a terminally ill wife, a daughter who hates him, and being universally reviled as the man who tried to weaponize an alien species for profit, one of his few remaining escapes is relaxing in the holo-dome and feeding the pigeons, where he can pretend for a time that he's back on Earth again. But when the holo-dome begins to glitch, exposing the outer dome and the space beyond, an unsympathetic Weyland-Yutani employee quizzes him on his choices - which he assures her that there's more to the story that he can't talk about for legal reasons - and then tells him that a repair crew will arrive in eight months, before giving him the standard corporate sign-off. As he loses his temper at being blown off, however, Burke notices a light in the sky from something speeding towards D350-L8 - Cygnus.
Twenty years earlier, Burke retrieved the obsolete combat android Cygnus from the waste disposal planet Arcadia 234 and rebuilt him for a purpose - to track down a Xenomorph egg and bring it back to him. Despite considering the plan "futile, pointless, and undeniably dim-witted", and noting both the illegality of the request and the immense improbability of finding a Xenomorph egg within Burke's lifetime given the only known source was destroyed in the reactor meltdown on Hadley's Hope, Cygnus complied - and, thirty-five years later, he returned to Burke with a Xenomorph egg. Taking the capsule to a disused storage warehouse Burke had converted for his own purposes after the mine began to run dry, Burke reveals his plan - when he'd been the Special Projects Director, he'd learned of the Xenomorph's genetic ability to overwrite the DNA of other organisms as part of its reproductive cycle. He thus reasoned that if Xenomorph genetic material could be isolated and analysed, it could make for an unprecedented medical breakthrough, used to directly attack infections, diseases, viruses and cancers that would otherwise be incurable. It could save billions - including his wife. Cygnus expresses surprise at the nobility of the idea. Burke retorts that he's "a surprisingly noble guy", before turning his attention to "which unsuspecting shmuck we're gonna impregnate".
He procedes to interview a number of the less popular employees working under him, but for one reason or another, he finds his conscious pricked by each one - except for the basement dweller, who he discovers had left months earlier and he hadn't been informed, much to his annoyance. However, providence comes in the form of Senior Director Hiro Yu, who has arrived to talk to Burke about several hundred HR complaints about Burke from his employees - a large number of which came directly from his daughter. It becomes clear the young executive has come to fire Burke, and suddenly Burke's choice becomes a very easy one.
When Hiro comments on the Pulse Rifle attached to the wall of Burke's office, Burke explains that it was a memento from Hadley's Hope and was the one used by Ellen Ripley herself, to Hiro's amazement. Taking the Pulse Rifle off the wall, Burke continues by telling Hiro that it has her initials engraved on the handle, but you have to look close to see it... and then butts him with the handle, knocking him out cold, and has Cygnus help him drag the unconscious Hiro out to a disused area of the mining facility, comically avoiding being spotted by his employees, who are enjoying a birthday party for one of the team and totally miss the kidnapping. When Hiro comes to, he's strapped to a chair, Burke's watching with an acid-resistant face mask covering his mouth, and the egg is slowly starting to open.
Desperately begging not to let it impregnate him, Hiro reveals that he is in fact Hiro Yutani, the son of Shin Yutani; that he resents his father for giving him menial jobs while his sister is groomed to be the next head of Weyland-Yutani; that he has sufficient clearance to get Burke any resources he needs to save his wife. With seconds to spare, Burke bats away the leaping facehugger, but he and Cygnus are unable to capture it before it escapes into the vents. Realising it will get into the tunnels where his daughter Brie works, he releases Hiro and the three of them rush down to try and catch it and warn Brie of the danger.
Hiro and Brie immediately hit it off over their shared dislike of their respective fathers and Hiro's knowledge of mining power loaders, and the two go hunting for the facehugger together. The facehugger leaps at Burke but Cygnus catches it, only to unexpectedly throw it away, allowing it to escape again. It then leaps at Brie, who catches it in the claw of the power suit. Cygnus prepares to shoot it before it can get free, but Burke causes him to miss. The point is rendered moot when Harold, one of the miners, unexpectedly comes down in the elevator and is set upon by the fleeing facehugger before they can stop it.
Cygnus and Burke take Harold to their sickroom to prepare to operate while Brie goes for a drink to deal with all that's going on so she doesn't have to think about what might happen to Harold, and ends up sleeping with Hiro and having a bonding session with him, in which Hiro assures her that in spite of her father's flaws, he does genuinely love her and he's a far better father than Shin Yutani ever was. Hiro wants to take Brie away with him and start a new life with her on Earth, but she reveals that she's unable to leave the colony due to growing up in an artificial environment caused her lungs to atrophy, making exposure to a natural atmosphere potentially fatal.
Meanwhile, in the operating theatre, something has gone terribly wrong - what nobody predicted was that the embryo laid within Harold's body was not a regular Xenomorph drone, but a Queen, which bursts out, killing Harold, and sets on Cygnus. Burke is able to escape and trap it in the disused section of the mine, and rushes to Brie's quarters to tell them what's happened - and is quite horrified to find them both disrobed.
The three of them suit up in power loaders (with Burke struggling to enter and then use one, which is a basic model for beginners chosen by Brie specially for him) and prepare to take on the fast-growing Queen. But - surprise! Hiro betrays them both and knocks them both down, planning to out-Burke Burke and deliver the Queen to his father to win his approval. Burke comes to in an all-too-familiar situation - he's embedded in resin in a Xenomorph hive with eggs all around. Only this time, it's not only him that's trapped - his daughter is here too.
When asked how he escaped previously, Burke recounts his lucky escape and bemoans the lack of a Vasquez to save them. However, Brie is able to free them with an acetylene torch on her belt, which is able to melt through the resin. Burke, fully aware of the danger posed by the Hive, elects to head straight to the office complex and warn his staff, giving them time to escape while he and Brie deal with Hiro. The staff assume it's a drill, but as soon as Burke mentions the word 'Xenomorph', the office clears before he can say 'orderly fashion'.
Once they're alone, Burke has a confession to make to Brie - there's nothing wrong with her lungs. He made up the atrophied lungs condition to keep her from leaving the colony because he didn't want to lose her. He further reveals that her mother isn't dead as she believed, but remains in cryosleep to stave off her illness until a cure can be found - the cure he hoped he could use Xenomorph genetic material to create. However, Brie barely has time to respond to this revelation when Burke is in for a shock of his own - Hiro has taken Zoe (Burke's wife and Brie's mother) in her cryosleep chamber to use her as a host for his own Xenomorph egg, stolen from the Hive while Burke and Brie were subdued. He's already reached his ship and is preparing for takeoff, but when they reach the spaceport, they find Xenomorphs had already overtaken it and killed some of the office workers, forcing the rest to retreat back to the office warrens and barricade themselves in. Burke now has a dilemma - stop Hiro and save Zoe, or face the Xenomorph Queen and defend his employees.
Burke tells Brie to go after Hiro alone, recognising that he can't abandon his staff and leave them to die. This is his chance to atone for Hadley's Hope, and he rationalises that it's what Zoe would want him to do. They split up, and Burke returns to his office to retrieve Ripley's Pulse Rifle - this time, to use it for its intended purpose and follow the example Ripley set when she used it 35 years earlier. He then gets in through the vents and saves the office workers from the attacking Xenomorphs with a few well-placed bursts of 10mm armor-piercing, light explosive rounds. This comes as a surprise to everyone, as they all assumed he'd already escaped and used them as bait for the Xenomorphs.
Just then, the Queen bursts through the barricades, irate at having her drones decimated. It looks bleak - but then Brie comes in with her power loader, hoping to give the Queen something to fight while Burke evacuates the others. But he's not going anywhere - and neither are they. One woman, Gloria, manages to slash the Queen's tail and sever it with a makeshift blade (getting severe acid burns on her arm in the process) and the rest set on it. Brie manages to provoke it to attack her and traps it with the vicelike grip of the claw, and this time, Burke won't miss - he empties the clip into the Queen's head. Gloria sets a fire to destroy the office as plausible deniability to get Burke off the hook, suggesting that Burke's procurement of the Xenomorph egg was done at Hiro's behest and that Hiro set the fire to destroy the memo to cover his tracks.
The survivors escape in a freighter with the GPS disabled, and as they're all presumed to have died in the Xenomorph infestation or the ensuing fire, nobody knows they're coming. Hiro has a massive lead on them, and he still has the egg and Zoe - but they have the element of surprise on their side, and Burke thoughtfully placed a tracking device on Hiro's ship while Hiro was unconscious as a contingency, meaning they know exactly where he's going. One way or another, they're going to take on Hiro, Shin, and the company. Having finally earned the respect of his daughter and the people in his charge, Carter Burke has finally emerged from the shadow of his treacherous past and established himself as someone willing to fight for what's right, and now he's bringing the fight to Weyland-Yutani.
Goofs[]
- Lieutenant Gorman, whose first name was revealed to be Scott in the 2014 reference book Alien: The Weyland-Yutani Report, was referred to as William in the first issue of Aliens: What If..., which is a reference to the name of actor William Hope who portrayed the character in the 1986 feature film Aliens.
- Within the opening pages of issue #1, an alternate timeline of events depicted Burkes ability to escape from the hive in which he had been cocooned when Gorman and Vasquez, trapped within the operations center by a swarm of Xenomorphs, detonated a grenade, killing themselves and the Xenomorphs that surrounded them. The blast being the reason Burke was knocked loose from the hive's resin, allowing him to escape. Though, in the 1986 feature film Aliens, it was stated that the hive was located beneath the atmospheric processing station, miles away from the colony's operations center, where Vasquez and Gorman took their own lives.
Reprint history[]
The five-issue series Aliens: What If... will be collected as a trade paperback that is set to be released on October 1, 2024 and will reuse cover art from issue #2 by Phil Noto.
Gallery[]
Variant covers[]
